Lives and Metamorphoses of Great British Mages

Two idols surged out of the indistinct, magnified skies of Music for Programming. They danced above and over the moors of January that we inhabit. We gazed at their dance.

The first idol was two, twin machine-birds of intricate composition: one drew in the grey the harmonic wave of a system in perfect order, the clockwork loop of the Newtonian Universe that soothes us into the sleep of stasis, and the dream of incoming truth.

The other climbed and barrelled and cut upon its own trajectory like the discordant doodles of that daughter of chaos who will inspire and vex mathematicians until the end of time.

We followed these two mismatching buddies raze the sky in their best impression of, say, Tango and Cash ultimately abstracted, and thanked silently whatever mad commander had thought a good idea to pair them together. Perhaps that’d be God, or whichever logic decrees that pure order is the state of death, and so it’s its opposite, after a moment of gibberish.

The second idol was many, as many as there are rooms in a manor that is the carcass of a collapsed giant. We descended inside its abdomen and wandered. We did not dwell in those older rooms –rooms where the Mage and his mates pocked and picked at veils of lies like a coroner at his morgue, see, we are dwelling in them! Onwards.

Into a balcony gazing over an amphitheatre built before alien seas, populated by new people with other rituals. Here we found a music box whose melody was warm like the gamelan, but also like blood drawn with blade, its voice a dissolution in the universe, again peaceful, but a burial nonetheless.